Well you're completely right, that first sentence was DOA (I edited it to hopefully take away less from the rest of my comment). And it's certainly true that any extension language will be used if it enables one to get things done. And I would rather have something extensible, rather than something utterly braindead where I end up using another language to generate extension scripts.
But I still think Lisps impose an overhead on reading code, and that overhead is highly unfriendly to a moderate GNU user who just wants to start poking around to see what happens under the hood and customize a few things. If a goal of the GNU project is to empower users to extend their own software, that burden should be avoided.
The problems I said with macros not being visually distinct reflect what I've personally found when trying to grok others' code. Many special forms are easily picked out, but one must be sure that all have been picked out in order to separate the control flow from the expression trees.
But I still think Lisps impose an overhead on reading code, and that overhead is highly unfriendly to a moderate GNU user
Interesting thought, but where is your evidence? From personal experience, I've spent the most time reading and writing Perl and Emacs Lisp. As a result, I find both of them easier to read than Python, which is a language designed to be readable. The reality is that all computer programs are hard to read if you don't practice reading them. (As an aside, I would estimate that about 20% of programmers "in industry" are able to fluently read code. The rest just write the same thing over and over again and are confused when they are asked to fix bugs in code they didn't write.)
But I still think Lisps impose an overhead on reading code, and that overhead is highly unfriendly to a moderate GNU user who just wants to start poking around to see what happens under the hood and customize a few things. If a goal of the GNU project is to empower users to extend their own software, that burden should be avoided.
The problems I said with macros not being visually distinct reflect what I've personally found when trying to grok others' code. Many special forms are easily picked out, but one must be sure that all have been picked out in order to separate the control flow from the expression trees.